Campus Beat: After the Election Life Goes On
By Emily Rutherford - Nov 17th, 2008 at 10:21 amFor at least the two weeks leading up to the election, and the week after it, no campus paper had anything of local import to say. However, things are slowly returning to normal, so here’s what’s happened on America’s campuses as we all settle down and get back to our lives (with a bit of election reaction thrown in as well):
To my mild surprise, even protesters at Brigham Young University marched over the weekend against California’s Proposition 8. Like the protesters in California, they placed themselves in opposition to the Mormon church, which donated substantial funds to the Yes on 8 effort. However, the action is all the more striking in Utah. It’s incredible that folks are voicing their opposition even there.
Of course, every single publication in the country was excited about Obama’s election, but the UChicago Maroon’s spin was entertaining. Its headline the Friday after the election read, “Obama, Former Law Professor, Wins Presidency.” Yes, that’s true… but I can think of quite a few ways to write a headline other than noting that the president-elect once taught constitutional law at UChicago. I guess everyone is trying to play “Six Degrees of Separation from Obama” these days.
The city of Berkeley’s always doing its usual hippie-esque thing, but last week, when 45 anti-war protesters marched through the city, the Berkeley College Republicans aggressively counter-protested with American flags and “support the troops”-ing aplenty. No harm was done, but it is an interesting indication of the fact that Berkeley’s radical image reflects better the politics of the city than it does those of the university.
A former UCLA psychiatrist who spoke at Dartmouth espoused a strangely sexist message about women’s sexual health. According to The Dartmouth, she believed that “[f]emale students almost always pay a higher emotional and physical price for casual hook-ups than male students do because of women’s hormonal and anatomical biology,” that “the average college woman [is] naive, misinformed and vulnerable,” and basically that women aren’t capable of processing biological imperatives to develop monogamous relationships in a responsible fashion. She also, in the process, dissed the ACLU. That, in my view, is the last straw.
Finally, the Princeton crime report is always worth a read and a laugh. The popular adage that “nothing ever happens in Princeton” is always corroborated by the report. The highlights: some couch cushions were stolen from the Forbes College common room; wheels were mysteriously removed from a garbage can; and the surprising discovery that an investigation into the odor of marijuana emanating from a dorm room was linked to the fact that someone was smoking—gasp!—in a dorm room.
You mean they were smoking — marijuana? Gad!!
November 17th, 2008 at 1:01 pm